[Rd] Specifying (set of random) port numbers for the help HTML server (Was: Re: Fixing html help port in 2.10)

[Henrik Bengtsson]

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 7:57 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca> wrote:
> On 17/10/2009 12:08 AM, Henrik Bengtsson wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 16, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Duncan Murdoch <murdoch at stats.uwo.ca>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 10/16/2009 10:39 AM, Dieter Menne wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I noted that the new html-help in 2.10 under Windows uses a random port
>>>> on
>>>> my
>>>> computer.
>>>> This cause a problem, because when I create a link such as:
>>>>
>>>> http://127.0.0.1:28027/library/stats/html/addmargins.html
>>>>
>>>> this is for one-time use only. Is it possible to fix the port?
>>>
>>> Not currently.  If you look in tools:::startDynamicHelp you can see how
>>> it
>>> is set up; you could duplicate that setup as a temporary workaround.  You
>>> might be better off to build R with static help instead.  What is the
>>> application where you want to be able to give out links?  Perhaps we
>>> could
>>> consult an environment variable or option() to choose the port instead of
>>> leaving it completely random.
>>>
>>> The reason it is random is the worry that multiple R instances on the
>>> same
>>> machine might collide.  All processes on the machine see the same ports.
>>
>> Related:
>> I'd like to suggest an option/environment variable that specifies the
>> set of port numbers sampled from, e.g. 6800:6850 or similar.
>
> I've added an option "help.ports" to set this.  It will try your specified
> ports in order; if you want a random selection, permute them yourself, e.g.
>
> options(help.ports = sample(6800:6850))
>
> This will make it into 2.10.0.

Thanks.

-Henrik

>
> Duncan Murdoch
>
>>
>> The reason is that in some places, the user don't have admin
>> privileges on the computer and most/all ports are blocked from running
>> servers, and there is a sysadm that needs to approve each port to be
>> unblocked.  With such a security polices it is possible to have the
>> smaller set of port number unblocked (but not the full 0-65535 range).
>>  This applies at least to "regular users" on Windows.
>>
>> My $.02
>>
>> /Henrik
>>
>>> Duncan Murdoch
>>>
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>>
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>
>